Objects and Powers

Over at the outstanding blog Dark Chemistry there’s an INTERESTING POST up comparing my onticology with Graham’s object-oriented philosophy. If you haven’t been reading his blog, you should start. He’s doing some of the best theory blogging around. Reflecting on my earlier post on Molnar and powers, the Craig writes:

To be “unmanifested” does not imply appearance (invisibility/visibility) at all. As Harman stated in his essay above the important thing to distinguish is not that an object is either invisible or visible, but “of the transformation of a thing’s reality.” In this statement Levi seems to confuse the issue of the real and intentional object by implying that if an object is dormant it would appear as if it didn’t exist precisely because it doesn’t appear at all, yet would still be “real and existent”. But again what does appearance have to do with it? Since a real object never appears to us or another object directly, but only indirectly through its intentional or sensuous appendages, properties, or qualities then why does appearance become a problem? An object does not need to appear to us or another object to relate, think of all those little microbes and bacteria that daily infest our lives and travel in the midst of that transparent region of our terrestrial globe we call the atmosphere, that negotiate there way burrowing through our porous flesh and into our subdermal systems and into our bloodstreams infesting us with all those terror born diseases we term epidemics.

Craig presents this as a criticism of my position, but I think rather that he underlines exactly the point that I’m trying to make. The point is that the appearance or manifestation of the object has nothing to do with the existence of the object. The object’s manifestation is secondary to its substantiality as an object. It is for this reason that objects cannot be reduced to their properties or qualities as someone like Hume would like to do. Qualities are like a rind that are but expressions of an object’s substantiality.

However, if I’m particularly fascinated with local manifestations and the conditions under which they take place, then this is because I am interested in questions of the conditions under which change takes place. The irreducibility of objects to their local manifestations also entails that objects contain within them a reserve or excess capable of breaking with the regimes of attraction within which they’re locked. Under different conditions they are, in a word, capable of other local manifestations. Here then we can raise the question of how these other local manifestations might be produced or activated and begin to develop a praxis with these aims in mind.

The point, then, would be that objects can never be reduced to effects of the regime of attraction within which they are embedded. Perhaps this point can be made more clearly with respect to the “docile bodies” section of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In the world of political theory all sorts of questions emerged as a result of Foucault’s theory of subjectivization in terms of power. Foucault seemed to suggest that the subject is a mere effect or expression of the power relations within which it is produced. If this is the case, the worry went, then no political engagement would be possible as the political agent would merely be an effect of relations of micro-power and would therefore merely reproduce these relations of power. This problem became even more acute with the first volume of The History of Sexuality, despite the fact that he there introduced the notion of counter-power emerging in response to power. The problem was that he grave us no real account of how this counter-power might emerge.

Now in my view, Foucault has given us something of incalculable value with his analyses of power, yet nonetheless the ontological framework within these analyses are developed suffers from actualism (the reduction of entities to their actualized properties). It is this actualism that gets Foucault in a position where entities become reduced to expressions of power or their actuality within a regime of attraction. It is my hope that distinctions such as that between virtual proper being and local manifestation can navigate a way through these sorts of dilemmas by marking a place of the excess of objects over their local manifestations.

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6 Responses to “Objects and Powers”

Thanks for the mention! And, yes, now that I reread your essay I agree with the above statement: “The point is that the appearance or manifestation of the object has nothing to do with the existence of the object. The object’s existence is secondary to its substantiality as an object.”

It is I, rather than you, that was confused about what you were up to, and with that distinction of the secondariness of existence to its essence and eidos I understand your point. :)

Somehow the dynamics of the fourfold is the missing aspect in this use of power, along with your use of ‘virtual proper being and local manifestation’. Yet, I’m sure that it must be implied rather than revealed in your thinking, since you were explicating on the concept of power itself rather than its dynamics within the internal core of the object’s life. I know that Harman uses the term ‘force’ repeatedly rather than ‘power’: power seems to imply something potential rather than an event or happening dynamic term. Strange how etymology (at least for me) bleeds into our thinking more than we realize.

Over time I’ve seen that the defining of terms in a philosophical position is one of the most important aspects, yet it depends if one is a dynamic or static builder of systems. If dynamic then terms skid across the full spectrum of rhetoric like a snowboarder across the korn snow; while static or analytical traditions seem to put things in lead boots, stick them in an iron cage and dare them to escape.

Hacking, while certainly influenced by Foucault, is markedly different due to his interactive kinds. As I see it Foucault repeats a form/matter binary, treating human bodies as passive matters and power as active form that is imposed on these bodies. Hacking’s agents, by constrast, are not passive, but actively interact with the kinds that befall them such that they are never cookie cutters that form dough. That’s a significant and important difference. Hacking, in my view, is on the right track. Those genealogies that Foucault exposes are techniques by which subjects are instantiated or formed.

I’m referring specifically to the Foucault between Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality. Huge debates arose precisely along the lines I articulate in this post (especially coming out of Butler, Habermas, and Laclau). One of the reasons that Lacan became appealing in the context of these debates was because of his account of desire and a subject that is irreducible to the signifying chain. Lacan suggested a way out of the deadlock I mention. You might also notice that I say, in the post, that Foucault gives us something of incalculable value in his analyses of power. I’m not dismissing him, merely pointing out that this isn’t the entire story. I personally don’t think Foucault’s later work resolves the problem, but that’s not an argument I care to get in.

[…] enough. We note that objects are able to embody a variety of possible states. As I observed in a previous post, there is the phenomenon of physical intentionality. There is a directedness of powers (virtual […]